LEONHIRTH: Proposed 1941 march helped add job rights

As the nation observes the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and celebrates the oratory of Martin Luther King Jr. with his "I Have a Dream" speech, another civil rights leader also deserves attention.

A. Philip Randolph, the founder and leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, was one of the organizers of the March on Washington in 1963. But 32 years earlier, Randolph was the driving force in organizing another march on Washington.

This march had at its purpose inclusion of blacks in the nation's coming war effort. Blacks had limited or no roles in the U.S. armed forces, and blacks could not work in the nation's defense industries.

Threat of a march on Washington led President Franklin Roosevelt to meet with Randolph and other black leaders and brought an executive order that opened the nation's defense industries to black workers.

To the disappointment of some organizers of the proposed march, however, Roosevelt did not order integration of U.S. armed forces. That would not come until 1948.

Randolph made an unsuccessful effort to transform the gains from the threatened march into a national civil rights campaign, the March on Washington Movement.

Any number of factors led to the failure of that effort, including, according to some observers, Randolph's leadership style that tended not to welcome delegation of responsibility.

Whatever those personal failings, the 1941 effort to march on Washington provides a useful reminder that the civil rights movement did not start in 1963 or in 1954 when the Supreme Court issued its school integration decision.

By the time of the 1963 March on Washington, the effort under way essentially was a Southern civil rights movement.

That was the case because earlier battles dealt with bringing equal opportunities in employment, transportation, education, accommodations and voting to the Northeast, the Midwest and the West.

The Fair Employment Act, as Roosevelt's executive order came to be known, was the first time that the federal government had acted to stop racial discrimination in employment in the United States.

Similar battles had to be fought on the state level around the nation. That the South was the last bastion of segregation perhaps is not surprising. But it was the last bastion, not the only bastion.

Success of the Southern civil rights movement resulted in part from the leadership of King and in part because of the intransigence of Southern leaders.

Tactics that King and other civil rights leaders used in the South, however, had been tested and refined in other regions of the nation. Even the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955-56 that first brought King to national attention used tactics tested in the Harlem bus boycott, also in 1941.

The Southern civil rights movement was a culmination of events rather than the origin of efforts to gain equal opportunities for black Americans.

Nothing about this background limits the role of the 1963 March on Washington or King in helping to gain these equal opportunities, but Randolph and his non-march also deserve a lot of credit for what happened after 1941.

Fortunately, Randolph lived to see his march plans realized in 1963.

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LEONHIRTH: Proposed 1941 march helped add job rights

As the nation observes the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and celebrates the oratory of Martin Luther King Jr. with his 'I Have a Dream' speech, another civil rights leader also deserves